Moon Panda

You can’t fault the studio teamwork: since first cruising onto the record shelves as a duo, Maddy and guitarist Gustav Moltke have embraced life as a live and recording quartet with drummer Josh Cabitac and bassist / producer / keys man George Godwin. The latter gets an extra nod for his ‘wonky wizardry’, as the album is literally and liberally sprinkled with adorable keyboard tinkles and sonic trinkets, like Jeff Lynne road testing primitive synth sound effects for ELO circa 1976. In a similar vein, Moon Panda’s music is riddled with gently paradoxical angles: it’s drowsy, but bright-eyed on ‘Penny’; futuristic, but nostalgic on ‘Space Elevator’; intense, but casual on ‘Automatic’; soft of melody, but so sharp of lyric in many other places. Is this something that occurs to them in the creative process or just some dumb lucking deliberate accident? “We didn’t really try to fit anywhere with this album, it just kind of poured out of us. And I guess we can let the algorithm gods decide where it all fits. But each of us has such different taste in music so I don’t we tend to settle in one place. It’s almost like an ouija board where we’re always pushing in our own direction and it could land anywhere. Some honorable mentions that take up a lot of space in our home are Faye Webster, Brad Stank, Cleo Sol, Kali Uchis…so a lot of softer, groove based, lyrical artists. And we tend to listen to a good amount of 60’s and 70’s soft funk groups.